[OldSchoolPro]

Heh, there's always opposition to new practices. Branching has been mainstream for a long time, it's only fair to expect resistance to any alternatives.

Give it a few years and everybody will use feature switching, except the old man enterprise dev :)

There are a million things that feature switching let's you do. Enable and disable instantly, enable for .00001% of the users, integration test different combinations, etc.

https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabflavor/article/recom...

[joesmo]

In my experience, branching has only been mainstream since git became popular a couple of years ago. Before that, when using svn and other similar systems, branching per feature was unlikely in my experience and a major pain.

[xorcist]

Branching is very well supported in Subversion. There is a reason feature branches occupy a large part of the SVN Book.

I would say feature branches were mainstream usage of CVS too, but SVN made it more popular because merging is more effortless.

Github probably popularized it, because they put a web interface on it (which is great), but that can be said for a lot of things.